Holiday, Schmoliday

All right.

I’ve already proven in these pages that I can be a curmudgeon. (1) My latest proof of this is a trip I made late this summer to my local hardware store.

It’s late August, and I’m in my local big-box (2) hardware store for the umpteenth time, reason I can’t recall but likely either (a) I ran out of some material, (b) something broke that needs fixing, (c) I broke something else while “fixing” the something that needs fixing, (d) I’m going through tool withdrawal. Or no reason whatsoever: Like lots of guys, I drive a vehicle whose wheels are somehow canted to roll me toward that store and then up into the parking lot. I swear, it’s true.

So there I am, in the store and heading toward one of the seventy-five aisles they have in this place, no doubt with a-b-c-d from above going through my mind. Suddenly, on my left, I hear a giant hiss, and there’s this motion from high above that seems out of place. For an instant, I fear I’m about to be squashed by something falling from a forklift. I turn and behold the World’s Largest Black Cat, perched high above a collection of the World’s Tallest Monsters. The hissing comes from the mini-windstorm created by the fan that stretches this thing’s inflatable hide. This Cat turns its head in a scary, all-seeing way, and I begin to feel, a la Kafka, that I’ve turned into a mouse (3).

Of course. Halloween. In August (4). My wife and I are still figuring out when to harvest things from our community garden, battling mosquitoes, groundhogs, and the occasional two-legged interloper. Halloween’s the last thing on my mind.

I take a few more steps, and wicked laughter erupts near my left ear. Some witch is beckoning, there’s a skeleton or two, a giant Minion (really?!), and more.

Where the heck are the tools?

By early October, my neighborhood has become a Collection of Giant Things. Skeletons tower over houses. Inflatable pumpkins, large enough to house entire families, occupy most of some front lawns. One house sports an entire family of skeletons, Mom and Dad at twenty feet or so supervising a raft of “kids” a mere six feet tall. (5)

And then there’s the smaller stuff. One house had a troop of dolls carrying a casket. That was actually pretty clever. Countless houses had skeletal hands emerging from the ground, witches flying smack into trees. The marketers have made plastic skeletons out of everything: dogs, dragons, bunnies, you name it. On and on it goes.

But here’s the thing. For all the statuary, we had barely a trickle of kids coming through to collect the means by which dentists pay for their own kids’ college educations. I wonder if this is the same in all neighborhoods, leading to Soubly’s Law of Halloween: The number of huge Halloween decorations on any block is inversely proportional to the number of kids collecting candy (6). And Trick or Treating started well before six, when it was still light out (7), and it was over with well before eight. To make matters worse, many of the older kids’ costumes looked like afterthoughts, the product of rummaging through the closet and thinking, “Well I’m never gonna wear THIS again. Unless…”

What happened?

I remember Halloween as a kid. As I recall, we were out All NIGHT. Maybe several. It seemed like the night lasted forever and we walked miles, whole gangs of kids. I’m sure my brother, a few years older than me, had been told to watch out for me, but that was kind of like asking the fox to guard the henhouse. We wore masks. We had costumes. I repeat, we stayed out ALL NIGHT.

We were the same kids who, the night before, had gone out armed with toilet paper and in some cases even eggs, to nail the house of the kid we’d targeted. We knew where each other lived. We’d played together (sometimes fought, it’s true) in the local park over the summer, and now, by gum, we were banded together in that relentless way kids have of joining packs and ganging up. This was Devil’s Night, of course, and while I’m sure that some greater damage was done, all I remember was toilet paper in trees and the occasional “burning lunchbag” trick (8).

Back to Halloween. I’m sure we returned home around midnight. I’m sure of it. Then, say oh, one o’clock in the morning, we’d be spreading our loot on the living room floor, dividing candy into jealously guarded piles, wondering if somehow we’d been shorted or if, in the nanosecond we weren’t looking, Dad had swooped in and grabbed his unearned share of the spoils (9).

Incidentally, Mom, ever the over achiever, had picked up these little four inch by four inch decorated Halloween paper bags and, day after day in the run up to Halloween, had scrupulously filled each one with exactly the same mix of candy and then taped them shut. These she handed out while we were pillaging the neighborhood, and I never saw an extra one after Halloween. Presumably she’d figured out a non-Dad solution for disposing of the excess (10).

To continue with this over-achieving thing. Between Halloween and Christmas is what I’ve come to see as the strangely hidden holiday of Thanksgiving. Sure, we gather and give pause and thanks and all that. But given its unfortunate placement between the decorating and marketing extravaganzas of Halloween and Christmas, what we generally hear all about is how to make the best bean casserole, the best heart-attack side, the perfect turkey, and so on. As if this changes, year over year.

These are some of the most stress-filled and socially crowded days of the year. If you’ve lit a pandemic fuse and want to toss the bomb into the population with maximum effect, this is the time to do it. Between travel shenanigans and Black Friday mobs, masses of humanity congregate in ways nature never intended, stressing fragile human systems past their breaking point. Add in the inevitable pre-Christmas winter storm, and you have everything NOT to be thankful for. All of which keeps the media breathlessly busy reporting on what is, after all, a holiday tradition: How to stress the hell out of each other while insisting we be thankful for the opportunity.

And, of course, the parades, football games and so on. Boatloads of people are working their fool cans off on Thanksgiving, just to entertain the rest of us (11).

As a kid, I thought it was perfectly normal for Mom (who had a full-time job as an executive secretary (what we now call admin) to a vice-president of a multinational company) — for Mom to get up around five a.m. on her day off and start the process of Cooking the Thanksgiving Dinner. From my upstairs bedroom, I could hear the clatter of things in the kitchen. Mom was preparing the turkey, among other things.

By the time I came downstairs and began the process of Wandering Around Aimlessly Waiting To Eat, the Mom Kitchen Factory was in full swing. Every burner on the stove was occupied, counters and the kitchen table were full of food in various stages of preparation. She even had a spare stove and fridge in the basement, which she’d conscripted for this occasion.

This was when Mom cooked mass quantities of pasta. She had cooking pots that held bathtubs full of water, and when all these were going there was enough steam in the kitchen to take the wrinkles out of a ballroom of clothes.

When I got older I would help in the kitchen. She assigned me the task of preparing the ravioli (12). Mom bought boxes of frozen ravioli from a local retailer whose IPO was likely made possible by her business. Inside the boxes were sheets of frozen ravioli. It was my job to break the sheets into individual ravioli meat “pillows.” Being the nerdy smartass that I was (and still am), I counted the number of raviolis per sheet, the number of sheets per box, and the number of boxes.

“Mom.”

“What?”

“You realize that you are cooking five hundred and sixty ravioli.”

“So?”

When your mother says, “So?”, there is no answer (13).

There are two things at play here. One is the Italian love of food, expressed through a Thanksgiving table with nary a square inch of open space. The second has to do with the Great Depression: having lived through that trauma, Mom didn’t ever want to repeat it or even be reminded of it.

Hence, enough ravioli to feed the entire block. Applied to the number of folks gathered around the table, about sixty per person.

And this is only one course, and not the traditional turkey, sweltering away in the oven. Plus antipasto, sausage, stuffing, vegetables, salad, on and on. Eating (or rather, laboring through) one of Mom’s Thanksgiving dinners was a marathon. Even as a voracious teenager, you had to learn to pace yourself. (It helped if you’d fasted several days in advance.) Inevitably, we failed. We’d think we made it through the battlefield of courses, limiting ourselves as best we could, timing it so that, just as the last course was served, our beleaguered stomachs were finally full to busting.

Then: “Who wants dessert? I have two cakes and three pies!”

Sigh.

Nothing for it then but to waddle, green to the gills, to our back porch to watch the traditional football game between those traditional non-contenders, the Lions and the Bears. Or maybe it was the Packers . I can’t remember. Thanksgiving food coma has a way of making you forget these things (14). Incidentally, our back porch was the size of an executive desk. I still don’t know how overstuffed males could wedge themselves in there, to fall asleep in front of the TV.

There is an upside. This is when I learned to be helpful in the kitchen (there being no room on the executive-desk porch), clearing dishes, cleaning up. (To this day, I believe it would have been easier simply to serve the meal on plasticware, rent a dumpster, and shovel the remains into it.) I think we had to notify the city that this amount of water was really being used in one kitchen, to clean up after one (admittedly humongous) meal.

Ah, Thanksgiving. A time to be thankful and happy. Unless, of course, you’re a turkey (16). Or worse, a second-stringer. Carrying on the tradition of overstuffing the bejesus out of everyone, a certain family member created lavish Thanksgiving dinners as well. At one such event, as we were eating, there was a “Ding!” from the kitchen. “That must be the backup turkey,” our host said.

Backup turkey? As in there’s a twenty-five-pounder causing the table to sag, but there’s a second one languishing in the oven? Imagine. You’re a turkey. You’ve given your LIFE to these humans, only to end up on the bench?

Enough on turkeys. If you’re like most people, turkey is great on Thanksgiving and (like the old saying about ham), a great definition of eternity thereafter (16). After Thanksgiving, there’s turkey sandwiches, turkey soup, turkey croquettes (or crapettes, depending on how tired you are of them), turkey fricassee, turkey mush, turkey spackling, turkey road tar, on and on.

And, of course, Thanksgiving serves as the launch pad to Christmas (17). Because these days, just as Thanksgiving wheezes to an end, the madness of Black Friday roars to life. Retail being godless, stores even open on Thanksgiving. I have not, and never will, participate in any kind of Black Friday event. I have no desire to find my nose and cheek plastered on the plate glass window of a soon-to-open store, having camped in the parking lot oh, three months or so, hoping to take advantage of once-in-a-lifetime prices that will be repeated the day after Christmas.

Nope. Nosiree.

And speaking of Christmas…. Well, let’s leave that one for another day. I wrote a whole novel on that one (18).

Until then, seriously, enjoy the holidays, eat wisely, hug your family, visit friends, do all the things that make this human endeavor worthwhile. And store up memories like the ones above which, I admit, are tales of love precious to me. We ease the pain of losing our loved ones by remembering them at times like this. In this way, they remain immortal to us always. These long-past days are a glimpse of what once was, easily forgotten in the rush to the next day.

Pause. Remember. Reflect. And give thanks.

And for goodness’ sake, don’t eat too much.

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(1) For a refresher, see “The Joy of Working Things Out.”

(2) Somebody tell me where this label came from, because I’m too lazy to look it up. Is it because the place is like a huge, square box? Or is it because what they sell often comes in big boxes? Or both?

(3) Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” in which the protagonist awakens to find himself transformed into a giant insect. This touches off a bit of an adjustment. One wonders what was in Kafka’s diet.

(4) OK, it could have been September. It could have. But work with me here: the point is, it’s WAY ahead of Halloween. And the way capitalism and competitive advantage work with respect to date creep, I’m thinking June one of these days.

(5) They actually leave one skeleton up all year round and “theme” it with seasonal T-shirts. Where they get those giant T-shirts is beyond me.

(6) I have a few of these. One is Soubly’s Law of Elevators. I was waiting for the elevator with a lady who was in a hurry, and I mentioned it to her: The speed of the elevator is inversely proportional to the hurry you’re in. Made her day.

(7) Thanks to Daylight Savings Time, one of the more stupidly named policies our country has produced. Have you ever succeeded in “saving daylight?” Did you try it as a kid? Get a paper bag and stand out in the sun? Of course not! By the time you were toilet-trained, you knew it wouldn’t work. (Oh. Oops. Sorry if I popped your bubble.) Now, to make it permanent, there’s a proposal called the “Sunshine Protection Act.” I didn’t know sunshine needed protecting, but there you are.

(8) Ah, yes. This was an older kid trick. Find some dog poo and put it in a paper lunch bag. Put the bag on your target’s front porch, light it on fire, and ring the doorbell. Watch from the bushes as some poor dad comes out and stomps out the fire. Sigh. That’s as much fire as we would muster, or that we even wanted to muster. Not so downtown in later years. Detroit gained an unsavory reputation for Devil’s Night infernos. Thankfully (and I’m serious here), people watching out for each other helped make nasty Devil’s Nights a thing of the past: https://www.audacy.com/wwjnewsradio/news/local/what-happened-to-devils-night-in-detroit

(9) This was a real threat. Dad could find candy like a bloodhound. Mom had resorted to finding what to us were pretty exotic hiding places, like hidden above the sideboard in the dining room. Didn’t matter. She’d pull down the stash, only to find that certain bags had a small hole, smaller than the size of the candy bars inside, through which Dad had extracted candy the way an octopus can slip through a tiny opening. He covered his obvious guilt with two of the most strangely disarming words in the English language: “Who, me?”

(10) Or, uncannily, she’d stumbled across the secret, Illuminati-guarded formula for determining the exact number of kids who would show up. But that’s hardly likely, given the Thanksgiving experience, which comes next.

(11) Does anybody even USE the phrase, “working your fool can off” any more? Or is my dad living on through me here?

(12) I discovered while reading this to friends that some folks may not know what ravioli are. They are little pasta pillows stuffed with meat, cheese, and these days everything from butternut squash to snails, toads and twigs. Mom had the small square variety, about an inch and a half on a side, filled with meat. They’re pretty filling as pasta goes. The only thing more filling than meat ravioli is probably gnocchi (nyOH-ki), which are mini potato dumplings that look like slugs. I used to like them a lot, causing an Italian friend of mine to observe, “Why don’t you try eating something lighter, like lead?”

(13) This prepares you nicely for marriage, by the way.

(14) This isn’t fair to the Bears or Packers, who have had their turn at contention. Not so the Lions, though 2023-4 may finally ease the drought.

(15) Several words about these birds. Franklin wanted the turkey as our national bird. That would have created a problem; I can’t see us eating eagles in November.

Turkeys are clueless, but not stupid. What do I mean by that? Well, Nicholas Nassim Taleb (NNT to his friends), wrote in The Black Swan that turkeys being fattened for slaughter spend their lives thinking the turkey farmer is a wonderfully beneficent sort, feeding them day after day, so that they come to expect that every day will be just like the day before. This works all the way up to that one surprisingly very bad day. Hello, Turkey Black Swan. Thus, clueless for what’s in store for them.

But not stupid. Alas, there is a persistent myth that when it rains, turkeys will look up to see where the rain is coming from and drown. I first heard this in college and as the source was authoritative (i.e., a tipsy friend), believed it for many years. Which makes me clueless, but (I think) not stupid. However, this myth is easily debunked. Go to any number of Internet sites for a scientific shredding. I’ll make it easy. If turkeys looked up and drowned whenever it rained, they’d have lasted oh, maybe a single generation. Nature has a way of handling this level of stupidity (human social institutions excepted).

(16) Attributed to Dorothy Parker, perhaps much older: “Eternity is two people and a ham.” Paraphrased here: “Eternity is turkey and any number of people.”

(17) To be honest, the run-up to Christmas seems to start before Halloween these days. Pretty soon, it’ll coincide with spring planting.

(18) “Santa, CEO.” I’m trying to rewrite this thing and will be inviting you along for the ride elsewhere on this site. For a taste, see “The Death of Santa.”